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Now Showing: Google Video On Privacy

Some webmasters may know of Google’sMaile Ohye
through her work in Google Webmaster Central, but now she plays a new role
explaining issues about search privacy, in a new video from Google. It’s
the first of several videos on the subject that Googlehas announced
that it will be
doing. I found the first one very good — something I would have happily pointed
in the past, when I’ve had to explain some key privacy issues.

It explains how a search query, IP addresses and cookies are all gathered and
associated together but in general don’t positively identify a particular
searcher with a particular search.

Google Anonymizing
Search Records To Protect Privacy from me does a similar explanation, including the idea of an IP address as a internet telephone number.
But watching the video, though more time consuming than reading, still felt
easier to understand. I especially liked how the way the log anonymizing program
that Google (and now
others) plans was compared to a credit card number having parts of it
blocked out for better security.

I really only had a few qualifications with the video.

First, while it’s true that an IP address generally can’t be linked back to a
particular person, you might well be able to trace it back more closely than
just to a city. For example (and ironically), Vanessa Fox who formerly ran
Google Webmaster Central recently
confirmed that she visited someone’s web site after they
analyzed their logs and noted that someone staying in the Drake Hotel in
Chicago had come to visit. The log data told this person that much — and
knowing she was in the city for a conference, helped in making an educated
guess.

This is a fairly unusual situation, and Vanessa still wouldn’t be positively
known as the person doing the visit, if she hadn’t confirmed it. But yes, IP
addresses can get more specific than the city level. Still, for a four minute
video, keeping things general is fine.

A bigger issue is that the video doesn’t explain that you’re fairly anonymous
as long as you aren’t logged into Google. If you do log into a service, such as
Gmail, you are much more closely identified with your searches.Google Search History
Expands, Becomes Web History from me explains this more.

Of course, the
blog post notes that future videos will be coming to explain the issue of
being logged in. So viewed as part of a series, this will be less of a concern.

One last thing is the video doesn’t explain why if Google knows so little
about you that it is adding that extra layer of security by anonymizing logs.
The reason, of course, is that however remote the chance, Google might
accidentally release log data. Far more likely is that Google might be compelled
by some government action to release the data.

In either case, if you have a lot of data tied to even an anonymous cookie,
you might be able to build profiles of people and guess at who they are — which
is what happened with AOL last year. That’s how the anonymization gives an extra
layer of protection — and I hope a future video will explain this aspect.

Overall, thumbs up. It had relatively little spin and some helpful info.